Virginia avoids common places, safety. She lived between the centuries, from 1882 to 1941. In Borges's words, her work "is loaded with delicate physical facts." When we read it, we feel the restlessness that keeps her always expectant, attentive to what happens next to her. We can think that her extreme sensitivity led her to border on madness - a state that in Virginia's life was called borderline. Quoting Stan Lee “With great power comes great responsibility”: her insanity that helped her write that unique work eventually led her to put on her coat, fill her pockets with rocks, and jump into the river near the house her. With this thought we would inadvertently place the image of Virginia within the framework of that feminine fragility enhanced by the Victorian era, an image with which she rivaled all of her work; And it should not be ignored that both she and her sister were girls who were sexually abused until well into adolescence by their half-siblings, which according to studies carried out after her death was what caused her seizures and subsequent depressive periods.

The twenty-six essays that make up this volume bear witness to his passions. Selected by her husband Leonard after his death, most of the texts had been published in newspapers, and had been reviewed by Virginia several times, although there are a couple of exceptions “that were handwritten by her, as usual, and then passed to the machine without much care ”. One of these writings is the one that gives the book its title, where she recounts how seeing an insect agonize forces her to abandon the pencil to get involved in reflections on the power of death over life, on that unequal struggle that is known to be lost in advance. . "Perhaps that is why when life oscillates and rumbles, we have the sensation of an altar of service, of sacrifice, before which, before leaving, we kneel," she says elsewhere.
How should the human being fight this fight? In her readings of Madame de Sévigné, Horace Walpole, William Cole, she finds answers: it is fraternal ties that give meaning to what she calls "Human Art" as a whole and in what she places her hopes of salvation. Western civilization: "whatever ruin the map of Europe will lay waste to in the years to come, it is a comfort to think that there will still be people capable of being absorbed by the map of a human face." Her essays "Street Loitering", "The Old Lady Gray", or "Three Paintings" are an example of how she applied this art. As a poet I know says: “fraternizing cures you”. Virginia highlights the importance for Walpole of "the blessing of his small audience" and how not to think about how important for Virginia was the blessing of those friends who would remain in history under the name of the "Bloomsbury Circle", among which were he found Leonard himself, with whom they would buy a printing press and found the Hogarth Press publishing house, which would publish among others Virginia herself, Katherine Mansfield, TS Eliot, Sigmund Freud. As Virginia says “the only way to read letters is like this, like with a stereoscope. Horace is, in part, Cole; Cole is, in part, Horace; Walpole's cook is, in part, Cole; therefore Horace Walpole is, in part, the sister of Cole's cook. " No one is ever alone.

The longest text is dedicated to Henry James. The clipping that she makes of her work is particular: she recovers a story that describes the horrors of the war published in 1914, the last volume of her memoirs and her letters. This selection rescues the figure of the public James over the novelist, as if he wanted to tell us that the artist should not be distant from the citizen, they are the same person: Public commitment is imperative. He does not believe in art for art's sake. She sentences in "Gajes del trades": "Words are not useful." Writing is a place of conflict: "How can we combine old words into new orders so that they can survive, so that they can create beauty, so that they can tell the truth?" he wonders who in life was considered "the first novelist of England." Leaving us the following advice in "Letter to a young poet": "Find the correct relationship between that self that she knows and the world outside."

The place of women in society was one of his great concerns. In "Professions for women" he takes up what was said in his book "A room of his own", and adds: although the physical place is necessary, once achieved it is necessary to become aware of the place that has been confined to women. "What is it to be a woman?" It is the question that is asked and asked of all women. What is the place of women today? Has anything changed since Virginia? Marge Simpson, seeing her kitchen remodeled, exclaims: "when Virginia Woolf said that all women needed a room of their own, she surely was referring to a kitchen like this." We understand the irony in the phrase: but how to understand today that a popular beer brand compares as a dream room a refrigerator room full of beers for men to a dressing room full of shoes for women?